Systems thinking

Your business operates in a domain that’s complex

Most domains are aggregated in a top-down and watered-down oversimplified way. Practicing multiple perspectives is practicing building schema’s for handling the complex connections and associations that a particular domain possesses.

Business, and entire industries in general, languages, mathematics and social learning are way too complex, layered, and represent an interwoven tapestry calling on people to use multiple schema’s, perspectives, and organizational skills, much more than top down approaches allow for.

Simplify your thinking

Systems thinking is a way of looking at organisations that emphasises the interconnections between parts of an organisation and external environments. It is also a method for solving organisational problems and helping organisations change.

The central concepts in systems thinking are interconnections, feedback, and time delays. Systems thinking encourages managers to identify the larger pattern of interconnections, or causal links, of which problems are a part. A problem to solve is seen as a symptom of an underlying pattern.

Feedback refers to the kind of cause-and-effect relationship found among system elements. Systems thinking distinguishes two types of cause-and-effect relationships, reinforcing and balancing relations.

Techniques

Organisational mapping

To understand how an organisation is organised to deliver its products and/or services, we view the organisation as an ecology and use a fitting organisational mapping. How Organisational Mapping works?

Wheel work

Wheels are excellent tools for covering multiple perspectives and checking we haven’t fallen in the groupthink trap. These are some examples from our past.

Diagramming of effects

A Diagram of Effects is a tool for reasoning about non-linear systems. The main difference with system roadmaps is that the emphasis is on the detection and further investigation of feedback loops. A “diagram of effects” makes it possible to discover cause and effect relations that are separated by time, and not immediately obvious. With these (re) cognitions we can find and communicate counter-intuitive, effective interventions. How Diagramming of Effects works?

Organisational sculpting

The Ship of Fools is an organisational sculpt with a pre-determined set of roles representing easily recognisable organisational elements. It can be used for

illustrating problems experienced by a particular type of organisation
illustrating relationships between central and local organisations
developing a strategy by assessing relationships with external organisations
team building by assessing the dynamics in and of teams
identifying the dynamics of a problem set of relationships
providing feedback to a system.

Gains of our services

Build cognitive flexibility (ability to represent knowledge from multiple perspectives).
Use grounded knowledge to meet the need of understanding or solving a new problem.
Gain knowledge from multidimensional and non-linear design to make associations across (sub)domains.
Build an authentic mind-map.
Include how (sub)domains are organized/clustered in your mind-map.
Explore different organizational techniques of (sub)domains.
Reconfigure the same material: Our report can be used again to show how the same material can be presented in multiple perspectives.
Reveal redundancy of information.
Assist memory processing of different stakeholders.
Know how to reapply which information in which contexts.